Accelerated builds of Android Ice Cream Sandwich now available on Linaro member boards

Linaro, a not-for-profit engineering organization consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, today announced the availability of builds of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) supporting accelerated graphics on two of its member’s low cost development boards: the Samsung Origen and ST-Ericsson Snowball boards.

Just over a month ago, within a day of Google’s release of the 4.0.1 ICS version of Android, Linaro showed videos of it running on the Texas Instruments (TI) PandaBoard and shortly after that on the Freescale i.MX53 Quick Start board, the Samsung Origen board and ST-Ericsson’s Snowball board. The accelerated graphics support that has been made available today makes use of the Arm Mali-400 graphics processor used by two of these boards. This graphics processor is integrated with a dual-core Arm Cortex-A9 processor: on the Samsung Origen board in Samsung’s Exynos 4210 SoC, and on the ST-Ericsson Snowball board in ST-Ericsson’s NovaTM A9500 SoC. Users of these boards can view videos of these latest builds on Linaro’s YouTube channel and download the accelerated builds for the Snowball and Origen boards on Linaro’s releases.linaro.org website.

Developers are able to create optimized Linux-based devices with the support of Linaro. For example, Linaro uses the latest GCC 4.6 toolchain to build Android, enabling Linaro’s Android to outperform standard Android builds in benchmarks and real-world tasks. The 4.6 toolchain allows developers to optimize for the latest SoCs like ST-Ericsson’s Nova A9500 processor and Samsung’s Exynos4210, which leads to an improved user experience. Furthermore, the toolchain gives early access to the performance improvements Linaro has been developing in the next release of GCC, as well as the many correctness fixes identified and provided through working with the Linaro community. As an example, the Linaro 4.6 toolchain includes features to allow software to manually or automatically parallelize compute tasks across the multiple cores in the chips.

Linaro operates openly, and these accelerated builds are the latest downloads enabling advanced product development on hardware from its member companies. Linaro’s goal is to provide consolidated and optimized open source software building blocks that provide companies with a foundation on which they can rapidly build and deliver innovative, differentiated solutions.

Join us for Linaro Connect Q1.12

Linaro Connect is held every three to four months to bring the Linux on Arm community together to work on the latest system-on-chip (SoC) developments, plan new engineering efforts and hold engineering hacking sessions. These events give the Linux community an opportunity to be a part of the Linaro team and help to define the Arm tools, Linux kernels and builds of key Linux distributions including Android and Ubuntu on member SoCs. Join us for our next event February 6-10th in San Francisco, California. Learn more at connect.linaro.org